Mr. Was Read online

  “Up on the bluff. But before we drive up there I’d like to drop in on Orville and Vera Sanders,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll want to know about your grandfather.”

  “Do I have to come?” I had an image of sitting around some hot, cramped living room watching a couple of old people drinking coffee.

  “What else would you do?”

  “I could just walk around,” I said. It was a nice day for February, sunny and warm enough to start the snowbanks melting. I figured anything was better than sitting around with Orville and Vera Sanders, whoever they were.

  She seemed doubtful, but after a moment she said okay. “Just don’t wander too far. I want to get up to the house before it gets dark.”

  We decided to meet in half an hour in front of the Memory Institute. That’s where she dropped me off, telling me that I might want to look at some of the photos. Wouldn’t you know, when I tried the door it was locked. A hand-lettered sign on the door said, BACK IN 2. HRS. That was fine with me. Why would I want to look at a bunch of pictures of dead people?

  The way the town was laid out, all of the businesses had been clustered on River Street. I walked up the street, looking in the windows of the abandoned buildings. They were either empty, or full of broken furniture and shelving and piles of junk. I turned up one of the side streets. The next street up was called Middle Street. Except for a boarded-up brick schoolhouse, there was nothing but houses. Only about half of the houses had their walks shoveled. The rest looked like they hadn’t been lived in for years.

  It took me about fifteen minutes to see the whole town, which was squeezed in between the railroad tracks and the bluff. I didn’t see a single one of the thirty-nine people who supposedly lived there, although in some of the houses the curtains seemed to move as I walked past.

  I was getting cold. The sun had dropped closer to the horizon and all but disappeared behind a haze of cloud. I headed for Ole’s Quick Stop, which turned out to be a sort of grocery store/video rental/bar/café/bait shop. There were two guys sitting at the bar, a couple of identical-looking old men with the dirtiest mesh baseball caps you ever saw, fingers as big around as bratwurst, bellies that looked like they’d had a contest to see who could swallow the biggest medicine ball, butts draping over the stools so far it looked like they’d stuck themselves on the posts. They both turned and looked at me with blank expressions. I didn’t get what they were looking at, but I figured I was the only thing they’d seen all day that they hadn’t seen a thousand times before. You talk about the boonies, this place was so far out they probably hadn’t heard which side won the Civil War.

  The guy standing behind the bar—I suppose he was Ole—wasn’t much better looking than his customers, but he was younger, he’d shaved more recently, and his cap was newer. You could actually read the embroidered front: WAYNE FEEDS. Who’s Wayne? I wondered. I took a look around and saw they had a pinball machine, one of the old-fashioned kind, five balls for a quarter. Half the lights were burned out, but it looked like it would work.

  “You got change for a five?” I said to the bartender. He did, and pretty soon I was trying to win games off a machine with a busted flipper and two dead kickers. I had just about got the hang of it when I felt somebody breathing down my neck. I trapped the ball on the flipper and looked back at Ole, if that was really his name, who was standing about two inches behind me, waggling a pair of fuzzy black eyebrows.

  “You’re pretty good with that,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “I never seen you around here before. You from out of town?”

  I nodded. “I’m just here for a funeral,” I said.

  That made him step back.

  “Who died?” he asked.

  “My grandpa Skoro.”

  His eyebrows went crawling up under the visor of his cap and stayed there. “Old man Skoro?” He turned to the pair at the bar. “You hear that? Skoro didn’t make it.”

  “ ’Bout time,” one of the men said. The other one snorted a laugh into his beer, sending a gob of foam out onto the bar.

  Ole gave me a long look. “You must be Betty’s kid.”

  I nodded.

  “So when’s the funeral?”

  “Day after tomorrow.” My finger was getting tired from holding the flipper button pressed. I released the flipper, shot the ball at the nine-ball target, hit it dead on. I got in a couple more flips before the ball drained down the right-hand side. Five hundred ninety-four points.

  Ole was still standing there, giving me this look. “So what’s gonna happen to Boggs’s End?” he asked.

  “Huh?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Your mom’s gonna sell it off, I suppose?”

  “I don’t know. What’s Boggs’s End?”

  “You never seen the place?”

  I shook my head.

  Ole laughed. The two guys at the bar just sat there staring at me with their stupid expressions, only now their mouths were maybe open a little farther.

  “C’mere, kid,” he said, grabbing my arm and starting toward the door.

  I thought he was going to kick me out for some reason, so I said, “Hey, I still got games left.”

  “I just want to show you something. You asked me a question, I want to answer you.” He pushed through the door and we walked out into the middle of River Street. A town like Memory, it wasn’t necessary to look both ways.

  The hazy clouds had solidified into a leaden mass. A few flakes of snow drifted earthward. An icy wind rolled down the bluff and blew into my open jacket. I zipped up and stuck my hands in my pockets.

  Ole turned and pointed back over his building at the rock face of the bluff.

  “You see it up there, kid?”

  I looked where he was pointing. At first, I could see nothing but the sand-colored face of the bluff and the gray clouds above it. Then I saw what he was pointing at. Right at the edge of the bluff, practically hanging from it, perched a huge house almost the exact same color as the clouds.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “That’s Boggs’s End.”

  “So? What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You know how come they call it that? On account of it was built by old man Boggs. He lived there with his wife and two daughters, then one day they all disappeared. Poof. Just like that. Back in 1927.”

  “Really?” I was only mildly interested. I didn’t understand what it had to do with me.

  “Used to be, people thought it was haunted. You believe in ghosts, kid?”

  “No.” The longer I looked at that house, the more it looked to me like a big gray toad. The two small round upstairs windows were the eyes. A strip of smaller windows overlooking the town formed a mouth. A pair of squat turrets, one at each side, were its legs. It looked alive, ready to shoot out its tongue, lapping up people like so many ants. It was such an odd-looking place I wondered why my mother hadn’t pointed it out to me.

  “Me neither. Anyways, we always called it Boggs’s End, on account of it was the end of the Boggses. Even after your granddaddy bought it and moved in back in the forties. Folks still call it that. Specially after your grandma disappeared back in ’81.”

  I said, “That’s his house?”

  “Yep. A hell of a place, ain’t it?”

  That it was. It was also the place where I would be spending the night. Ole was staring at me with this delighted expression on his face. I looked at his building. The two old guys were standing in the doorway, still giving me that goofy look with their identical mouths hanging open. I thought I knew why my mother hadn’t showed it to me. She hadn’t wanted to scare me.

  Boggs’s End

  It was snowing hard and getting dark by the time Mom picked me up. After getting that look at “Boggs’s End,” I hadn’t felt like going back into the Quick Stop. I’d been standing in front of the Memory Institute, stamping my feet, trying to stay warm.

  “You took long enough,” I said when I got in the car.
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  “I’m sorry, Jack. I had a hard time getting away.”

  “I coulda froze to death.”

  I put my hands in front of the heater vents, but the air coming out was still cold. At the north end of town we turned and followed a narrow, winding road up toward the darkening sky. By the time we reached the top the last of the daylight had disappeared. Snowflakes flashed confusingly in the headlights. We were driving into blackness—Mom was hunched over the wheel, pushing her head forward to see better. Trees crowded either side of the roadway, their naked branches dragging against the side of the car. Suddenly, the house appeared in the headlights. Mom stopped the car and we sat staring out through the windshield.

  It looked different. Just another big old ugly clapboard house, three stories, with round turrets jutting up from each corner. Not at all like a toad.

  Fresh snow coated the circular end of the driveway. All the tree branches and bushes were bent under its weight. Two squat columns supported a wide veranda that sagged in the middle. Our headlights reflected from the dark windows.

  “Boggs’s End,” I whispered.

  She nodded, slowly, her eyes tethered to the great gray house squatting before us. Then she gave me a sudden, sharp look. “Where did you hear that?”

  “A guy at the Quick Stop.”

  “Well, don’t call it that. I hate that.”

  We sat in the car in the driveway for what seemed like a long time before Mom opened her door, got out, and shuffled through the snow toward the double front doors.

  The first thing we did, once Mom found the right key and got the door open and flipped a light on, was turn up the thermostat, which had been dialed down to fifty-something degrees.

  “Your grandfather liked the house cold,” my mother said. “When I was a little girl, I was cold all the time.”

  Then we turned on the downstairs lights, including the huge crystal chandelier in the dining room. You would think turning on about a thousand lights would make a place seem warmer, but it didn’t work that way. The rooms were bright, but they were cold, like the inside of a refrigerator. And the air had a stale, lifeless smell. I knew that Grandpa Skoro had died in the hospital thirty miles away, with his hands locked around my neck, but I kept imagining I was smelling his body. Not knowing what else to do, I stood around watching my mother as she worked in the kitchen, throwing out the old food in the refrigerator, washing the crusty dishes in the sink, sweeping up the bits of dirt and old, dried food from the floor. I must’ve been hanging a little too close, because all of a sudden she turned and said, “Jack, why don’t you do something!”

  “What?” I said, hoping she wouldn’t put me to work scrubbing the floor or something.

  “There are six bedrooms upstairs. Pick out where you want to sleep and dress the bed. The clean linen should be in the closet at the end of the upstairs hallway. And you can take my bag up and put it in the green room.” It was her tone of voice where you didn’t argue, but just went and did it.

  I have to tell you, I didn’t feel too comfortable wandering around that house alone. Not like I was worried about ghosts or anything like that. It was just . . . creepy. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I grabbed the bags and climbed the wide, C-shaped staircase up to the second floor.

  The first bedroom I looked into, the one at the head of the stairs, was yellow. Everything was yellow. The walls were papered with pale yellow-on-yellow flowers, the table by the bed held a bright yellow vase with dead yellow flowers. The lace curtains over the window were the color of dried corn. Even the worn carpeting was a dull, mottled golden yellow. The iron bed, of course, was painted to match. The bare mattress was striped white, beige, and blue, but I was sure there were yellow sheets and a yellow bedspread tucked away in the linen closet.

  A painting of a tiger hiding behind a bush hung on the wall above the bed. I stared at the painting for a long time. The tiger looked real, like it was moving, like its eyes were following me. It looked familiar.

  The next room down was green the way the first bedroom had been yellow. The wallpaper was dark green fabric with a raised pattern of swirls and twisted teardrop shapes—the sort of shapes I remembered seeing on the insides of my eyelids the last time I had the flu. A bigger room, it had a king-size bed with a mint green canopy, its own private bathroom, and two walk-in closets.

  There was also a red room, a brown room, a blue room, and a gray room, the biggest bedroom of all, where Grandpa Skoro had slept. I knew this because the bed was messed up, and his clothes were scattered all over the floor. I closed that door. I didn’t want to go in, and I didn’t want to look.

  And then there was the locked door, which I figured led up to the third floor.

  I put my bag in the yellow room, because it was the farthest away from Skoro’s bedroom. I found bedding in the linen closet. Every color was available, so I went for blue sheets and a red bedspread—anything to cut down on the yellowness. I didn’t think my mom would go for the multicolored look, so I dressed her bed in green.

  When I got back downstairs, Mom was heating up a can of corned beef hash. It smelled great. We ate it with saltine crackers, pickles, and shoestring potatoes, which was about all she could find in Skoro’s cupboards except for ten cans of kipper snacks, which neither of us liked. A box of vanilla wafers took care of dessert. I was so hungry it didn’t even bother me that I was eating a dead man’s food.

  After dinner I was so tired I could’ve fallen asleep at the kitchen table. I remember asking Mom why the door to the third floor was locked. She said it was because the house was too big. Grandpa Skoro had kept it closed off to save on the gas bill. Even when she’d been a little girl, she said, they hadn’t used that part of the house. Now it was just a big storage space full of broken furniture and junk that was too nice to throw away. She said there were bats up there.

  “If you want to look, I’ll see if I can find the key,” she said. “In the meantime, what do you say we try to get some sleep? You’ll have all day tomorrow to look around.”

  That sounded good to me. I was really tired. Except for sleeping in the car during the ride up from Skokie, I’d been up for two days. And Mom hadn’t even had a nap.

  “Which room did you pick?” she asked.

  “The yellow one.”

  ”That was my room when I was a little girl.”

  I headed upstairs and fell across the bed. I didn’t even get undressed. Sleep came like a giant, soft hand pressing me down into the mattress. In seconds, I was gone.

  I sat up in bed. Moonlight filtered through the gold lace curtains. Thinking I was back at home, I wondered why my room looked different. After a second or two, I remembered where I was. And I remembered something else. For a long time, I sat very still, trying to fix the memory in my mind. Then I got up and went to the closet and opened the door.

  It reeked of mothballs. I groped for the light, found a cord hanging a few inches in front of my nose, pulled it. The closet was large, about four feet deep and ten feet long. It was empty except for a few clothes hangers hooked over a rod and a mist of spiderwebs filling one corner of the high ceiling. The walls were gray, as was the oddly-shaped door at the far end of the closet. It was shorter than most doors, about five feet high, but of normal width. The knob, tarnished brass with an ornate raised design, was located higher than you would expect. I had a sense of déjá vu, a feeling that I’d been there before, and that I had opened the door.

  I reached out, but my fingers hit something solid and invisible a few inches away from the knob. The invisible surface was hard and smooth. I knocked on it, producing a hollow sound. I tried hitting it with my fist. . . .

  • • •

  That woke me up.

  I was sitting on the floor in the dark, my knuckles throbbing. Again, I did not know where I was. I stood up, my head hit something, producing a jangly, metallic sound. I ducked and stretched out my hands, felt a wall. I moved along the wall, my heart banging away like crazy. A door. I found the knob,
turned it, swung the door open. Faint yellow light. I stepped back into the moonlit bedroom.

  I had been in the closet. I must have been sleepwalking, my body acting out the dream.

  I turned on the bedside lamp and sat on the edge of the mattress. A few deep breaths later, I started to calm down. As far as I knew, I had never sleepwalked before. I didn’t like it. Who knew where I might end up? What if I’d dreamed I could fly? I didn’t want to wake up on my way out of the window.

  The closet door stood open. I could see the empty wire hangers, one of them still rocking gently.

  Might as well have a look, I decided.

  The light cord was right where I had dreamed it. I pulled it, and the interior blazed bright yellow. I examined both ends of the closet.

  Walls, plain and unadorned.

  There was no door.

  The Funeral

  The next morning I found my mom sitting in the kitchen drinking black coffee from a fancy china coffee cup. She took a sip, scowled, and set the cup back on its saucer, then saw me standing in the doorway and smiled weakly. “Bitter,” she said. “Did you sleep okay?”

  I nodded.

  A plate of kipper snacks and crackers rested gloomily on the table. She looked at it, shrugged, and laughed. “There’s nothing much for breakfast. I don’t know how Daddy survived all these years.” She took another sip of coffee and made a face. “But I guess he didn’t survive in the end, did he?”

  It was one of those questions I knew not to answer.

  That afternoon, Dad showed up in his beat-up Cadillac with a suitcase full of Mom’s and my clothes and a case of beer in a cooler. Or anyway, what was left of a case of beer. He’d managed to drink a lot of it on the drive up from Skokie.

  He was in a good mood, but he didn’t smile and tell stories and laugh the way he usually did when he was drunk and happy. He was holding it all inside, like he did when he had good news but wasn’t ready to tell it. He asked Mom a few questions about the house, and about the funeral arrangements. She answered his questions in a kind of dull, tired voice. I had the feeling she had been glad he’d decided to come up for the funeral, but now that he was here she wished he’d stayed in Skokie. She kept calling him “Ron, honey,” the way she did when he was in a bad mood and she was trying not to set him off.